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The #PandemicFund 's draft medium-term Strategic Plan is open for public comments until Friday. Join the conversation and contribute to our path forward.

Share your thoughts by April 26th!

For more information: thepandemicfund.org/news/public-co…

A clever and unique study documents that much Covid transmission occurred via shopping in retail stores
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… PNASNews Thais Lærkholm Jensen CEBI - Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality

Now here’s a tour de force for ya
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/04/21/now…

I would have hoped that in 2024 a central topic of the public conversation would be pandemic preparedness.

I would have expected that we would all be keen to make the investments that make it less likely to suffer through another pandemic, with more deaths and lockdowns.

Men *really* want to run marathons in under four hours

In 2010, YouTube had 800M active users + streamed 2B+ videos daily.

But internally, we were flying by the seat of our pants.

One burning question was on our minds:

How were people actually using YouTube?

Here's the story of how one UX researcher ignited sweeping changes to

This survey in Significance summarising how medical statisticians feel (under)valued prompted me to reflect on my career so far. With reference to some quantitative results, here are three brief bits of advice for early-career #medical #statisticians ...

academic.oup.com/jrssig/article…

Enjoyed giving a dinner talk on probability, prediction and risk at TED2024 (including probably the best backdrop I’ve ever been lucky enough to speak in front of)

Super cool paper from Dr Sophie Meakin and Sebastian Funk (@[email protected]) on how assumed hospital catchments affect short term forecasts. bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

There are some who understand that the future doesn’t just happen — it’s made. Among these are the TED Fellows: innovators, activists, artists, inventors and dreamers. Meet the class of #TED2024 . blog.ted.com/meet-the-2024-…

Remembering that time, three years into the pandemic, when the editor of some widely shared nonsense interviews seemingly realised that covid was actually a really nasty virus...

New Christie Aschwanden podcast episode on scientific uncertainty and how I revised my views on the backfire effect open.spotify.com/episode/0uEaFU…

For more, see my article in PNAS: 'Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions' pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Interesting reflection from Demis Hassabis at #TED2024 - many in the industry didn’t perceive language models as ‘ready’ to be a product, because they often hallucinated etc. But ChatGPT showed there was a massive public appetite, despite all their flaws.

Perhaps a case of not

Something that may be useful in this release is a vignette that walks through how to estimate the effective reproduction no. in the presence of latent and observed delays.

package.epinowcast.org/articles/singl…

Note there are some clear tooling gaps in this that it would be great to fill.

Morning Vancouver. Looking forward to #TED2024

📢 New editorial out in BMJ Global Health: 'Stuck in ‘the field’: why applied epidemiology needs to go home’.👞🏠🧪

Reflections from my work participating in transnationanl outbreak investigations and reviewing other peoples' TL;DR below.👇

gh.bmj.com/content/9/4/e0…

One of the benefits of working with a great editor is they’ll suggest changes and you’ll realise that in hindsight these were things that have been quietly bugging you - you just didn’t quite know why or what to do about it.

And if you’re interested in analysing antibody data for Chagas to uncover transmission patterns over time, see this case study (and accompanying R package) by Zulma Cucunubá🦟 and co: epiverse-trace.github.io/serofoi/articl…

This modeling work is so, so good! Hats off to James Hay and co.

I often complain about the quality of the science in epi modeling. But this? This is just excellent. Biologically rich. Epi rich. Great data. Thoughtful model. Excellent approach to inference. Just outstanding!